[airspirit]

Going NForce2 Ultra 400 (some have integrated Gigalan) with overshot and highly air cooled XP 2500+ chips (over 3200+ speed easily anymore) will free up money for other stuff. Explaining the cost effectiveness of replacing those chips should they die should make a controller happy.

Also: going with cheaper chips allows you to get more system memory, which is of great importance in that type of machine. Memory availability should be of higher importance than modest chip speed gains in a CAD machine, and memory bandwidth is KING. If on an XP, make sure that bad bastid is running DDR400 or faster (IOW: over 200 FSB).

That brings me to another point: 64 bit chips. While the software may not be 64 bit (and don't doubt that they will port it for these reasons in the near future), the Opteron platform can give you kick ass SMP with great memory support. A dually Opteron w/ 1GB per chip can do good things, and since it is a forward looking platform, it would be more servicable down the road if things break than any current Intel platform. This will be expensive (more so than the Intel idea), but would be the better investment, IMHO.

Combine either of those ideas with some SCSI HDDs or SATA at the least, and you could have some good terminals for your doodz0rz.

As far as CAD cards go, I hate to say it but you may want to look at the NVidia FX cards ... supposedly they do better in some CAD programs due to driver support and such, though my brother rages in 3DStudioMax on my old 9500 Pro OC'd ... I can't help you there.

I should say, though, that the 9800 Pro runs some nice dual monitor stuffs, and I'm really liking the ease of use of the Hydravision suite ... the NVidia dually software could suck my whoosiwhatsits for all it sucked. You will only get 3D imaging in Monitor 1 in a configuration like this, however, so many people render in one screen with all the other assorted crap in the other for ease of use.